My day at the office started with this little accident which could pretty much sum up the whole mood for the day:
But I have decided to go ahead and play hooky as planned tomorrow, thanks to another colleague who has offered to represent my interests at the only meeting I really felt obliged to attend.
Toward the end of the day, the week-long constant rain and cloud cover rather suddenly cleared so I went on a run and Evan did a bike ride. Then we continued our procrastination by getting takeout and making a run to the liquor store. Finally, we realized no one was going to make it happen if we didn’t — and we ventured back to the garage to put the new drums on the rear wheels and bleed the brakes.
Evan was delighted at how easy and quick the brake bleed turned out to be. Apparently they usually take a lot longer and force a lot more air out of the system. He kept mentioning this throughout the process. Should I be worried? But the brake pedal feels as heavy as ever after we were all done. Guess we’ll find out.
With that done, we’re back where we’ve started: likely driveable. It feels quite momentous, actually. And it was still early-ish, so we started picking off some of the secondary items on my list.
A couple years back, the passenger door handle broke and, rather embarrassingly, I have yet to fix it. Until tonight! This was probably the most egregious bit of my truck’s dilapidation and repairing it felt like repaying an old debt to a friend. It was annoyingly difficult, but I think the punishment fit my crime of letting it go so long.
While I did that, Evan applied some rust converter and primer to the floor under the bench. He also added and completed a scope creep item: he applied sound deadening padding to the inside of the doors and the floor. Even tapping on the doors with my finger is dramatically quieter than it was before — since the truck hadn’t shred of sound deadening material anywhere on it before.
George put the rear tires back on and then worked with Evan on putting the replacement battery tie-down while I finished up some work on the doors and did a little cleanup. Breaking down a few of those parts boxes really made me see how much we’ve accomplished already.
Yet again, George offers the best record of the evening:
Tomorrow, I imagine we’ll sleep in a bit, then get started on the window trim pieces while we wait for the bench to be ready. What I don’t know is how to squeeze in getting the exhaust replaced during business hours before I have something to sit on to drive. And of course the brakes still have yet to be tested and the transmission needs to be refilled…